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I found the following article about the Activity Monitor. I followed the steps there (although I am a local admin on the sql server and should have had all of those permissions already) to no avail. The server is running Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter SP1. When I remote desktop to the server itself and use SSMS directly I have none of these issues, and when a domain admin connects to the server through SSMS remotely everything also works for him.

2 Answers
2

The behavior you are seeing happens if you aren't recognized as having permissions to manage services on the remote server. This MSDN article describes some possible solutions on how to grant users rights to manage services.

Does the service account for the agent have local administrator permissions on the server? Have you stopped and started database services and the SQL Server agent service on the server since encountering this problem?

That article is for windows server 2003 - will it still apply for 2008? The service account is a managed service account which I've added to the local admin group. I restarted the agent service which didn't do anything but I can't restart database services at the moment since this is a production server. I am a local admin on the server as well.
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MansfieldJul 4 '13 at 19:28

After rebooting the server having made the service accounts local admin, it started working. Thanks!
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MansfieldJul 8 '13 at 12:13

If you have entered the correct log in info, the issue is most likely linked to the fact that the sqlserver service has been disabled somehow.
You can check its status and re-enable it by going to services.msc.